An Hour of Who a Day: July 27: "Heaven Sent"

July 27: "Heaven Sent"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Heaven Sent"
(from Incredible set of retro Doctor Who
series 9 posters)

The clues are there fairly early on. "When I was a very little boy, there was an old lady who died," the Doctor says. "They covered her in veils, but it was a hot, sunny day, and the flies came. It gave me nightmares for years. So, who's been stealing my nightmares?"

Of course, if you've seen the episode then you know the answer (and if you haven't, you should go do that now), but "Heaven Sent" gives us a Doctor trapped in his own personal hell. (Incidentally, am I the only person who thinks it would have been better if they'd swapped the titles of this episode and the next one? What exactly does "Heaven Sent" mean in the context of this particular episode anyway, other than as a cute parallel with "Hell Bent"?) He can't really rest, he has no one to interact with (and therefore no one to persuade or impress), and there doesn't seem to be a way out -- just a series of odd puzzles instead.

And so we're treated to something unique in (televised) Doctor Who. We've had episodes without the Doctor (such as the various ones in the '60s where Hartnell or Troughton were away that week -- or "Mission to the Unknown", if you want one without any of the TARDIS crew), but this is the first time we've gotten an episode that only has the Doctor. (Well, all right, there's that quick cameo from Clara, but as that's in his head anyway that's still technically the Doctor.) Just the Doctor and the Veil, a silent, slow-moving, implacable force, trying to get the Doctor to confess something or die. And what this means is we get an astonishing and incredible performance from Peter Capaldi.

I mean, to be fair, it's not necessarily that Capaldi is doing anything that different from other episodes, but he definitely has to do a lot more than normal. "Heaven Sent" is focused solely on the Doctor; there are no cutaway scenes to other locations, no sinister figures outside monitoring his progress. Every scene involves the Doctor; there are no moments (save the opening ones, which bear witness to the aftermath of the last go-round) that don't include him. That's a hell of a burden to place on an actor, but Capaldi is magnificent. He makes a 45-minute monologue as compelling as anything else, and it's a tribute to his skill that the audience is never bored by this. And the range of emotion on display (such as anger, puzzlement, and fear) give us a fascinating insight into the mind of the Doctor. We see him use the TARDIS as his own mental palace²⁶⁷, where he shows off in front of an imaginary Clara as a way of figuring out how he's going to get out of his current predicament. We see him confess things to the Veil ("I didn't leave Gallifrey because I was bored! That was a lie! It's always been a lie! ... I was scared! I ran because I was scared!"), but only as a way to make the puzzle-box castle move. We see him try to figure out the prison he's inside, with copious notes in his notebook. And that's how he slowly works out what winning actually means, and what he's endured: going through this whole process for 7000 years, just to punch at a wall 400 times harder than diamond a few times, and then doing the whole thing again.

That of course leads to the completion of the circuit as the Doctor burns himself up to provide the energy to bring himself back, his pattern still in the "hard drive". And that leads to the montage as the Doctor gets further and further through the azbantium wall, in a process that takes over two billion years. It's an impressive, affecting montage, seeing how long it takes. It also makes you wonder what the first few (thousand?) times were like, before he left himself clues like "BIRD" in the dust, or "I AM IN 12" in the grave -- indeed, how long did it take him to discover that the way out was in room 12 in the first place? When did he paint the picture of Clara? What was it like, those first moments of the first second of eternity?

And that, I think, is the true brilliance of "Heaven Sent". It's not just Peter Capaldi's performance, or Rachel Talalay's direction, or even Steven Moffat's script. It's the fact that, despite the fact that Moffat has provided us with another puzzle box storyline, where all the pieces have been aligned to fit just so in order to make everything make sense (such as "The Girl in the Fireplace", "Blink", or "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang"), he's provided us with so much canvas to fill in the details around this particular cycle for the Doctor that you can't help but be impressed by the sense of scale and scope. And so taking a script like that and then putting Peter Capaldi in the middle of it, with Rachel Talalay supervising the look? That's brilliant.

(And this doesn't even address the final moments, as the Doctor steps out on Gallifrey and announces that "The Hybrid is me." Or possibly, "The Hybrid is Me [aka Ashildr]." That's another hell of a cliffhanger.)

²⁶⁷ A technique that also shows up in Moffat's other big series, Sherlock, which was written not terribly long before this series of Doctor Who.